Unifying author names, separating authors, unique identifiers

Abstract

The use of unique identifiers is highly beneficial for authors, institutions, publishers, funding organizations and scholarly societies, and, of course, to Current Contents databases like MATARKA. During the 14 years of its existence, the number of authors in Matarka has reached 320,000. As there is no standard on the creation of current contents, it is necessary to continuously deal with unifying author names. Two problems are to be solved: to differentiate between people having the same name, and the opposite problem, when different names point to the same person. A great help is the use of unique identifiers. Beside the use of unique identifiers, the standardization of author names and the disambiguation of authors with the same name, the present article describes the work-flow of introducing the DOI code for electronic documents as well.